This dissertation takes as its subject matter transformations in subjectivity that take the form of learnings, apprenticeships and (de)habituations. Instead of conversion, rupture and direct negation, the temporalities and styles of the transformations in question take a form that adjusts to the everyday, soft powers of habit, in its signature ambiguities between passivity and activity, insensibility and acquisition of new capacities. The aspect of ''paideia'' characterized in this fashion is explored in the specifically ''poetic'' company of the formal experiments undertaken by the historically para-modernist trio made up by Henri Michaux, Paul Valery and William S. Burroughs. Although the study has the formal characteristics of a collection of monographs, this is in the context of the consistency of a larger problematic which breaches the self-containment of each engagement.

What distinguishes these writers is a common tendency to conceive writing and formal abstraction at large as a process of intervention in automatisms of thought, feeling and perception on a basis not limited to the thematic or narratively representational. Their experiments hinge upon the way new symbolic constructs (like cut-up, combinatorially produced notebooks and gestural graphisms) can be used as performative aids in the quest to alter the configurations of human capacities like perception, attention, memory, reading and pattern recognition. Each writer in his own fashion puts the contingencies at play in the expansive practice of writing in relation with the contingencies of becoming, by charging formal abstraction with the task of creating variations in the experience of time: it is not only about the abstract forms, but the regimes of temporality in accord with which such forms are elaborated.

Furthermore, being astute communicators of their experimental aims, each writer displays a critical awareness of the limits of his artistic production, supplementing the poetic work in form, graphism and abstraction with reasoned and critical discourses of research open to productive dialogues with various disciplines, insofar as they offer perspectives on apprenticeship and habituation: philosophy, biology, neurosciences, developmental psychology, literary and semiotic studies of form and even addiction research (as in Burroughs' work).

The approach taken by this study in the face of such a potentially vast field of ramifications relies as a heuristic on a form of philosophically directed close reading across several carefully chosen force fields. In engagement with each writer, the dissertation tries to locate problematic points of entry that both extend and complicate the main framework, making for a multiplicity of models and examples which offer disparate but complementary views on the problems at stake: from Valery's organologically inflected concept of human possibility ''implex'', through Michaux's semiotics of everyday situations, to Burroughs' reframing of the problem of addiction as a problem of reading, the questions of apprenticeship and habit seldom take an identical form across these authors, and the study aims to do justice to the incomparabilities while articulating a network of concepts that establish links: inertia and automatism; a revitalizing repetition; differences and overlappings between specialized capacities; effortfulness or effortlessness; limit, obstacle and inability; and finally value.

Ultimately, these themes are not imposed on the careers of the writers, but organically generated from within close engagements with their writings. Nevertheless the framework created in this fashion can be expanded to yield futher insights concerning the domains which informed the study in the first place: the fortunes of graphic abstraction in the 20th century art and aesthetic theory; philosophical considerations of plasticity and ontogenesis; and finally studies of learning, apprenticeship and psychological development.